Hello Friends, Family, and Fans;
Despite everyone and their grandmother praising AI and how it will change the world for good… It’s scaring me. Is it Adam’s Law? Am I a luddite? Or is everyone else just wrong?
5. What if it works?
The goal of most of the big AI companies is to reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where AI will match or surpass humans. Now that’s kinda cool and all, but at the moment AI is using so much electricity and water that we can barely keep up. What happens when we get to AGI or sapience?
There’s a weird, almost religious, mantra in the tech-bro world that says once AI hits AGI, it’ll be able to fix those problems. Even if they’re right, we will have done immeasurable damage to the environment by that time.
4. Cognitive Decline
The over-reliance on technology often leads to loss of skills and loss of specializations. Few people know how to cut film for movies anymore. Not many encyclopedia salesmen running around. Most people my age don’t remember more than a few phone numbers. I’m not sure that any of that is all that sad.
However, several studies have shown a loss of critical thinking skills. I’m hoping this is a trend that will slow down as the use of AI becomes more expensive. It’s still scary to think that people are letting AI do their information gathering and critical thinking.
On a similar note, the absolute deluge of slop is a huge misinformation problem. Not only are bad actors creating division and misinformation, but AI is hallucinating and pushing bad info everywhere.
3. Lowered Expectations
This one really worries me. In the same way that a factory can churn out cheap products; AI can produce staggering amounts of content.
As a society, we’ve slowly become used to cheaper goods that don’t last long but are inexpensive. (In some cases shoddy products that are ridiculously expensive simply because of a brand name.)
AI can create video, images, and even novels, and it costs almost no energy for the person putting in the prompt. It’s easy to dismiss it as a hobbyist’s tool, but then Coca-Cola makes some low quality ads. Is the ad bad? No. Some of the visuals are amazing but there are so many errors that if it had been made by humans, it would have never been released.
Beyond ads, Disney has talked about self-prompted videos of their huge catalogue. Why would they pay humans to write or animate if they can just use AI?
Writing a book or story is hard, unless you use AI. Multiple magazines have had to shut down because they couldn’t go through all the submissions.
As a reader, I’m disgusted at the big publishers charging $20+ for an ebook. With the death of the mass market paperback, it’s really expensive to buy new books. If an AI prompter can make 5 books a week and charge $1, that will entice people, even if they are middling or poorly made.
2. Cost and Bubble
All the AI companies are gobbling up RAM, VRAM, and hard drives like college students at a buffet. It means that all tech is going to get more expensive, and in the short term we’re going to see a stagnation in products. Phones, computers, etc are going to have lower specs and higher prices.
If AI continues on this course, it’ll be 5 to 10 years before production will stabilize. If AI can’t produce AGI and the money dries up, the bubble bursting will bankrupt multiple companies and manufacturing will take a longer time to ramp up again.
Either way, the consumer will end up paying more for everything. Don’t forget that computers are used in everything, including farming and manufacturing. Increases in their costs will be reflected in ours.
1. Capitalism
LLM’s, which is what we’re calling AI, are a fabulous tool with great use cases in medicine, science, accessibility, data entry, etc. Unfortunately it’s being controlled by people who want nothing more than to make money.
From dynamic pricing to personalized misinformation, it’s all about money. The cost to the environment, art, copyright, human consciousness, life, or truth isn’t as important as their bank accounts. They will use it to squeeze every last penny out of the consumer.
My worry is how many jobs in the arts, customer service, and teaching will be replaced by poor imitations in the name of cost efficiency.
I hope that all this is unfounded and the technology will prove to be wondrous and make the world a better place.
What are your opinions?
Stay safe and be kind,
Éric
